Documenting consensus (RE: making strategic problems concrete)

Harald Tveit Alvestrand harald at alvestrand.no
Mon Mar 24 08:47:08 CET 2003



--On søndag, mars 23, 2003 23:24:29 -0500 "Bound, Jim" <Jim.Bound at hp.com> 
wrote:

> Consensus is not well defined, it permits a persistent reviewing of the
> same topic over and over.  It is good to revisit our ideas, but after
> first agreement, having defined checkpoints, similar to project change
> control in industry, would assist with when a previous consensus point
> can be open for review.  Or at least a process to do this so it is not
> random and ad hoc.  This would also permit a bad consensus decision to
> be revisited and prevent it not being revisited if it has become broken.

one thought.....

a peculiarity of our process is that the records kept are usually:

- internet-drafts
- RFCs
- meeting minutes
- mailing list archives

RFCs are the end result of our process.
internet-drafts are transient, under editor control, and focused on the 
deliverables, not the process.
meeting minutes concern only the physical meetings.
and finding the decisions in a 100-message-per-day WG debate archive is 
hell itself.

Is there a real problem in that we don't have any means recognized by the 
process of documenting the "consensus of the moment" except by people's 
memories?

                      Harald



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